I desperately need some help with my Scanview Scanmate Plus drum scanner. I recently purchased this from a private party and don't have a lot of documentation. I not getting crisp, clean scans from the scanner. Everything is functional, but the sharpness is not there when I complete a high rez scan. Can you offer some help with this, an adjustment somewhere, cleaning , whatever.

Thanks.

-- Matt Pinnick (matt.pinnick@riegner.com), October 10, 2001

Answers

Matt, do you have experience with other scanners as a comparison, or is this your first scanner? The reason I ask is that there is no scanner that will make a scan that looks perfectly sharp on your screen when viewed at 100%. Even a Tango scan looks annoyingly fuzzy, because it's getting down past the sharpness of your lens into blurry territory. To know whether your scanner is okay, look at the little hairs and dust spots that inevitably appear on your scans-- if THOSE are sharp, then your scanner has no problems.

Also, as a hint, don't try to correct the fuzziness by doing unsharp masking at the scanning stage. Learn to put up with fuzzy images when working on Photoshop, and do your sharpening only at the final stage AFTER you've scaled and sized the image for a print. Each time you re-size for a different sized print, start with the unsharpened full-sized file again, then do the resize, then sharpen for that size print.

Good luck.

~chris jordan (Seattle)

chrisjordanphoto.com

-- chris jordan (cjordan@yarmuth.com), October 10, 2001.

Matt, there is no focussing adjustment that the operator can do on the ScanMate Plus. All you can (and should) do is perform a white point calibration. Maybe the optics need a little cleanup. This is very difficult to do as the drum is not removable. The software (I suppose you use ColorTrio and not ColorQuartet) has no unsharp filter and that needs be done in Photoshop after everything else has been performed, and as suggested, not on the archive file. Can you mail me a small hi rez TIF sample of a scan including the data printed in the border of the film so I can have an idea? (keep it to less than a Meg!)

-- Paul Schilliger (pschilliger@smile.ch), October 10, 2001.